Single Room Occupancy (SRO) Hotels as Mental Health Risk Environments among Impoverished Women: The Intersection of Policy, Drug Use, Trauma & Urban Space

Due to the significantly high levels of comorbid substance use and mental health diagnosis among urban poor populations, examining the intersection of drug policy and place requires a consideration of the role of housing in drug user mental health. 

In San Francisco, geographic boundedness and progressive health and housing polices have coalesced to make single room occupancy hotels (SROs) a key urban built environment used to house poor populations with co-occurring drug use and mental health issues. Unstably housed women who use illicit drugs have high rates of lifetime and current trauma, which manifests in disproportionately high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression when compared to stably housed women. 

We report data from a qualitative interview study (n=30) and four years of ethnography conducted with housing policy makers and unstably housed women who use drugs and live in SROs... The degree to which SRO built environments were “trauma-sensitive” at the macro level significantly influenced women’s mental health at meso- and micro- levels. Women who were living in SROs which exacerbated fear and anxiety attempted, with limited success, to deploy strategies on the meso- and micro- level to manage their mental health symptoms. 

Study findings underscore the importance of housing polices which consider substance use in the context of current and cumulative trauma experiences in order to improve quality of life and mental health for unstably housed women.

Read more at: http://ht.ly/SgArz 

Via: Knight KR1, Lopez AM2, Comfort M3, Shumway M4, Cohen J5, Riley ED6.

• 1Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, United States. Electronic address: kelly.knight@ucsf.edu.
• 2Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, United States; Urban Health Program, Research Triangle Institute International, United States.
• 3Urban Health Program, Research Triangle Institute International, United States.
• 4Department of Psychiatry, Trauma Recovery Center, University of California, San Francisco, United States.
• 5Department of Clinical Pharmacy, University of California, San Francisco, United States.
• 6Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, United States.